Bluer Than Velvet

by Mary McBride

  The pirate probably charged extra for cream and sugar. She dug in her pocket for quarters, suddenly picturing Sam sifting teaspoon after teaspoon into his cup. She’d have to wean him away from that nasty habit one of these days and wondered if she’d ever get the chance.

  “How long do these hostage deals usually last?” she asked, handing her change up to the man, assuming he was probably an authority on the subject since he ran an affiliated enterprise.

  “Depends,” he said, leaning forward, shoving aside plastic bottles of mustard and ketchup in order to brace his massive and hairy forearms on the win dow’s little drop-down counter. “I’ve seen a couple of them take, oh, maybe thirty-six hours or so. Some of them have gone well into a second day.”

  Laura gave a soft, low whistle. “That’s a long time.”

  “Yep. Most of those long ones, though, were back a couple years ago when we had a different sheriff calling the shots. Now, this Harrelson, the new guy, he’s all business. Doesn’t coddle crooks the way Sheriff Zachary used to do. Harrelson’s more of a shoot first, ask questions later kind of guy.”

  A voice sounded behind Laura’s back. “I’ll second that, and I’ll take another cup of that black swill you call coffee, Louie, and one of those cherry Danishes, too.”

  Laura turned to see Linda Sturgis dragging a comb through her hair, then critically studying the results in a small hand mirror.

  “Long night, huh?” the reporter asked as she dropped the mirror and comb into her oversized handbag.

  “Longer than I expected,” Laura said. “You don’t know what’s going on inside the house, do you?”

  The woman shrugged. “I wish I did. But if I had to guess, I’d say that Sam’s just being smart and waiting Crazy Janey out, not to mention praying that Ed Harrelson doesn’t do something incredibly stupid.”

  “What do you mean?” Laura asked with a barely suppressed gulp.

  “Oh, like tossing in a little tear gas canister or really going for the gusto with that precious SWAT team of his. He hasn’t ruled that out, at least he hadn’t when I last talked to him about fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Oh, my God,” Laura muttered, wondering if Sam knew what was going on outside, if he had any idea that all hell could break loose at any moment. It wasn’t a good time to be fighting drowsiness, she decided, so she called up to the now deserted window of the snack truck. “That was two coffees, black.”

  Louie reappeared. “I’m making a fresh pot, ladies. It’ll be done in just a second. Linda, I thought you said you were going to get around to interviewing me when there was a lull in the action.” He aimed a thumb toward the house. “Hey, is this a lull, or what?”

  The reporter looked at the house, then back at the man in the window, and grinned. “You know what, Louie? I’m so tired of talking to that idiot Harrelson that I’ll do it. Just let me go find my cameraman.” She took a step, then stopped to call back. “Oh, and Louie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Didn’t you mention something about free coffee and Danish for the duration.”

  “No problem, Linda. You got it,” Louie said with a huge, gooey wink just before he produced a gray rag and began wiping down his counter and each plastic condiment bottle on it.

  Laura cleared her throat. “Is that coffee done yet?”

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot about you, Missy. Lemme check. That was two large black, right?”

  “Right.”

  She stood there, staring at Janey’s house, wishing she had X-ray vision and could see through the walls if only to reassure herself that Sam was still okay, thinking that a week ago she hadn’t even known him and now, surprisingly, her future happiness somehow hinged on him.

  “You better come out of this alive, Sam Zachary,” she said softly.

  “Laura?”

  She whirled around at the sound of the male voice.

  “Laura, doll. I saw you on the news.” Artie’s hand curved around her arm possessively. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  Chapter 13

  It was the strangest, damnedest kiss Sam had ever experienced. Not only was his body eerily disengaged from the intimate act, but his mental focus was everywhere except on the woman he had successfully lured into his arms.

  All the while they kissed, he kept one eye on the television screen, evaluating the scene outside the house and trying to anticipate Harrelson’s next idiotic and possibly lethal move, and at the same time frantically searching his brain for remnants of his Marine Corps training.

  The word shimewaza flitted through his mind, and long ago images of grimacing Marines with camouflage grease on their faces and no pity in their eyes. If done properly, Sam knew, a choke hold could render a person unconscious for several minutes. But the problem was that he’d never had an opponent who weighed less than a hundred seventy five pounds, the majority of which was muscle. And it went without saying that Captain Sam Zachary, USMC, had never been kissing the daylights out of the guy while attempting to subdue him.

  Janey was built like her sister with bones as delicate as porcelain. She couldn’t have weighed much over a hundred and ten, and her muscle tone left a lot to be desired. Right now, of course, every nerve in her little body was hot-wired with adrenaline. It was like kissing a time bomb covered with quivering flesh.

  The Browning semi-automatic figured into Sam’s equation, too, because even as Janey was melting like butter in his embrace, she stubbornly held onto the gun. At the moment, it was somewhere near the small of his back, undoubtedly pointed up toward his head. A bullet in the brain stem was definitely not the ideal ending to this scenario.

  “Sam,” Janey breathed against his mouth. “I’ve wanted this all my life. You know that, don’t you? I’ve wanted you all my life.”

  “I’m here,” he answered softly.

  “I’ll be better to you than Jenny ever was. I’ll be better for you. She never loved you, Sam. She never…”

  “Shh.”

  He shifted his right arm slightly higher, above her shoulder blade, and moved his right leg just a few inches forward preparatory to edging her off balance.

  Somewhere among all his methodical calculations was the jarring notion that this should have felt like kissing Jenny, should have felt like having her back in his arms if only as a ghost. His heart, though, was as thoroughly disengaged as his body. Besides, it wasn’t Jenny he wanted in his arms anymore. It was Laura. The thought almost made him forget everything else he was doing.

  Forcing himself to focus on the television screen once more, he watched the newscam slowly pan away from Harrelson and his little knot of eager, camouflaged commandos, and swing out across the lawn toward the street where the snack truck was parked typically too close to the action. He could see that hustler, Louie, grinning like a snake oil salesman in the little awninged window from where he hawked his lousy coffee and greasy doughnuts, waving the cameraman toward him.

  Dammit. Go back to Harrelson, Sam ordered silently. Turn the camera back on him. I need to know his every stupid move.

  The camera paused momentarily, surprisingly, on Laura’s pretty face, just long enough for Sam’s heart to take a pronounced extra beat, and then the camera caught her turning all of a sudden to someone standing close, caught her stiffening, going rigid with fear as a hand clamped onto her arm.

  Artie! All this TV coverage! Sam ought to have known.

  “Sam. Love me. Love me. Love me. Take me away from here.”

  He had honest-to-God forgotten that his lips had been touching Janey’s until she pulled away and whispered breathlessly against his ear.

  “Love me, Sam. Take me away.”

  “I will, honey,” he said, maneuvering her solidly back in front of him, easing his right forearm into the warm nook at the back of her neck, kissing her again, more forcefully this time while using his arm as a vise, pulling slowly and inexorably, putting what he hoped was the proper force on the nerves just below the base of Janey’s delicate skull, and prayin
g all the while that her finger wouldn’t twitch on the trigger when she blacked out.

  Laura had struggled so hard, so fiercely, that it had taken both Artie and his hulk of a bodyguard, Leo, to wrestle her away from the snack truck and get her into the back seat of the limousine. Nobody at the scene had noticed her struggle or even heard her screams because only seconds after Artie grabbed her by the arm, a shot had been fired inside the house that sent everybody—cops, reporters, curious onlookers, even Louie—scrambling for cover.

  Now, scrunched in the corner of her leather upholstered prison, Laura wasn’t even frightened. She was just frantic about Sam and so furious with rotten Artie that she wanted to strangle him with the thick gold chain he wore around his neck. The strangulation was going to have to wait, though. First she had to find out if Sam was okay. Oh, God. Please let him be okay, she prayed.

  “I thought these things were supposed to have TVs,” she snarled, gesturing around the dim confines of the limo.

  “Well, sure.” Artie gave her a decidedly wounded look as he gestured toward an envelope-sized screen mounted above the window that separated the vehicle’s front and back seats. “It’s got a full bar, too, doll. How about a drink?”

  She hoped her glare would severely injure him. “I’d like to watch the news, if you don’t mind.”

  “Sure, doll.”

  He let out an indulgent little sigh as he leaned to his left and flicked a switch. The minuscule screen overhead lit up, revealing Sheriff Harrelson’s ferret-like face. Laura edged forward in the seat.

  “Hey, doll, listen. I’m sorry about…”

  “Shh,” she hissed, her eyes intent on the televised scene in Janey’s front yard. Where was Sam? Oh, God. Where was he? She didn’t see him anywhere.

  “But, listen…”

  “Shh.”

  Linda Sturgis’s face suddenly filled the little screen. “And so another possible tragedy has successfully been averted. The little girl, Samantha Sayles, was released without injury or incident, into the custody of her father, Wesley Gunther. Samantha’s mother, Jane Sayles, is currently in the custody of the sheriff’s department and being taken to Memorial Hospital where she will remain under observation as well as under arrest.”

  A wistful smile sketched across the reporter’s lips. “As for former sheriff Sam Zachary, the man who brought an end to this bizarre drama, we don’t have any more information at the present time. Our sources tell us that he was injured during a struggle for the Sayles woman’s gun, but the nature or extent of those injuries isn’t known. It’s possible that he was also taken to Memorial Hospital, along with Jane Sayles. We’ll have more details on our 6:00 a.m. Newsbreak. For now, that’s all from here. This is Linda Sturgis, Channel Five News.”

  Laura sank back in the seat. “You can turn it off now, Artie,” she said almost tonelessly.

  Crouched behind a ragged forsythia bush two blocks west of Janey’s house, Sam waited for Charlie to bring the Blazer around. If he didn’t get away fast—from Harrelson’s victory speech and the interminable questions of the press—he knew he might be too late to get to Laura before Artie did whatever Artie wanted to do in order to carve his initials on her.

  He was hurt, but not enough to slow him down. The bullet, he was pretty sure, had zinged a little furrow across his side, just above his beltline. There wasn’t time to worry about that now. He had to find Laura. If anything happened to her…

  Charlie turned the corner, and Sam stood up to flag him down.

  “I’m sorry, boss,” was the first thing out of his mouth when he got out of the driver’s seat. “She was getting coffee for us. I should’ve kept a better eye out.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Sam said, hauling himself into the car.

  “Hey, you’re bleeding.”

  “Don’t worry about that, either.” Sam pulled the door closed.

  “You need help?”

  “Probably, but I’m headed into the city and you’re on county time, Charlie. The last thing I want is any kind of jurisdictional hassle from Harrelson.”

  “Yeah. Well, you’ll probably need this.” The officer handed Sam’s pistol in its shoulder holster through the window. Sam had taken it off prior to entering Janey’s. “The sheriff was so busy brown-nosing the press that he didn’t even see me take it.”

  “Thanks, Charlie.” Sam shoved the gun under the seat, then put the truck in gear. “Gotta go.”

  “Wish I could help.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Well, what do you think of the place, doll?” Artie turned to Laura from the center of his leather and chrome and glass living room, his arms outstretched, a proud smile on his sleazy lips. “You like it?”

  She hated it. She despised every stripped down, uncluttered, neutral, spare, antiseptic square inch of it. The off-white leather couches crouched on half an acre of wall-to-wall off-white carpet, and all of those walls were off-white, too. The only color Laura could detect was the green of the stalks of a vase of off-white silk lilies.

  But even before she saw the apartment, while they were riding up seven stories in the elevator with Laura scrunched between rotten Artie and his trained gorilla, Leo, she knew she’d hate it.

  “It’s okay,” she said, not willing to risk another black eye over a difference of opinion about decor.

  “Okay?” Artie exclaimed. “This stuff set me back thirty thousand big ones, doll. It’s a lot better than okay.” He gestured to a far wall. “That’s a genuine Eames chair. What do you think about that?”

  Laura shrugged. All she cared about right now was Sam. Desperately. All she could think about was how she was going to get out of this horrible off-white wilderness and back to Sam.

  Knowing Artie’s tendency to violence when he didn’t get his way, she decided she’d have to come up with a better strategy in order to escape. But what?

  “How about a drink?” he asked. “I’ve got the best stocked bar in town. Whatever you want. A margarita. A Black Russian. The vodka’s straight from Moscow. Ninety-nine bucks a quart.”

  “No, thanks. It’s late. And I…”

  Sudden inspiration struck.

  “And I’m not feeling so well, Artie.” Laura swayed slightly as she lifted her wrist to her temple, hoping she wasn’t overdoing it. “Is there someplace I could lie down for a little while?”

  He was beside her in an instant, the heavy musk of his cologne nearly toppling her. “I’ll take you to my room,” he said as he lifted her up in his arms and started across the wide expanse of carpet. “I was going to show it to you next, anyway.”

  I’ll bet you were, Laura thought. She closed her eyes and pressed her head against his shoulder with a pitiful little moan. He wouldn’t try anything with a defenseless sick woman, would he?

  At the end of a long white track-lit hall, Artie pushed open a door and angled Laura through it.

  “You’re gonna love this, doll. Wait a sec. Lemme find the switch.”

  He leaned, Laura still in his arms, and snapped on a light.

  “How about this?” he asked, jouncing her to attention.

  If she really had been sick, she might have thrown up all over him. And not just from the jostling, but from the hideous, horrible room. It was black. Unrelieved, unadulterated, unparalleled black. The carpet. The walls. The furniture. Everything. It reminded Laura of a tomb. In contrast, the stark white living room seemed positively cheerful.

  “You can put me down now,” she said.

  “Oh. Sure. Here.” He walked toward an enormous bed and set her down on what felt like a leather bedspread. “Can I get you an aspirin or something?”

  She lay back with her forearm draped wanly across her supposedly pale and feverish brow. “An aspirin would be good.”

  But since it would probably only take him half a minute to retrieve one, and Laura needed more time than that, she added, “Do you have any ice cream, Artie? It sounds silly, I guess, but sometimes that’s the only thing that helps my heada
ches.”

  “Ice cream?” Artie appeared befuddled, at least as far as Laura could detect of his features in this sepulcher of a room.

  “Yes.” She turned on her side, drawing her knees up into a fetal position. “Strawberry seems to work the best.”

  “I dunno. I’ll go look. You wait right here.”

  “I will.”

  “Want me to turn the light out, doll?”

  “No. Please leave it on,” she answered weakly.

  “Okay. Stay there now. I’ll be right back.”

  Laura counted to twenty to make sure Artie was gone before she sat up. Given the creep’s penchant for physical violence, she’d already given up the notion of trying to escape on her own. There was no way she could outrun him. She’d have to outwit him, instead.

  What she needed at the moment wasn’t strawberry ice cream, but a telephone. Artie’s turned out to be encased in a small ebony box on his black lacquer nightstand. But now that she had the phone, she didn’t know who to call. If she called 9-1-1, what was she going to say? Help, I’m being held prisoner in a black bedroom?

  Sam. She wanted to call Sam, and she didn’t even know his phone number, plus he wasn’t home even if she did. She wanted to hear his voice, to touch him and make sure he was all in one solid piece. She needed her Superman, not just to rescue her from this, but always. Somebody able to leap tall buildings and cook pizza from scratch, to blanch tomatoes and maybe even find the father she hadn’t seen in over twenty years.

  The father! Wait a minute. That was it. Not hers, but Artie’s. Laura knew her landlord’s phone number by heart and she knew he always worked late into the night. She punched the numbers quickly. If she couldn’t call Superman to rescue her, maybe at least the Hammer could pound some sense into his son’s thick, obnoxious head.

  Sam didn’t have a clue where Artie lived, but he knew how to find out. He used his left hand to push through the main doors of the Hammerman Building, trying to keep his right arm tight against his side to keep the bleeding at a slow leak.